We have been on another amazing adventure in the wilderness, and so again this is a rather long article as it transcribes my written diary made as we trekked through the awesome jungle of northern Laos. It has been a journey through paradise and luckily is set to continue for another 3 weeks until visa restrictions mean we have to abandon here in favour of diving off Thailand's Andaman coast. Its a hard life but we're hanging on in there.
10th and 11th Dec: Leaving China
We spent the day preparing for our journey out of China and into Laos PDR (universally acknowledged as Please Don't Rush rather than People's Democratic Republic) by shopping, planning, panicking a little and in my case wheezing with the tail-end of a real stinker of a cold. We caught the 5pm sleeper bus to Laos in time and we're a little perturbed to discover that it wasn't actually stopping at our destination of the northern town Luang Nam Tha (LNT) despite earlier assurances to the contrary, but a swift bit of negotiation on Ellen's part got an agfreement to drop us at Nateui not too far away and where the main roads fork. The bus itself was quite interesting, consisting of 3 columns of double-tiered narrow beds running parallel to the direction of travel, unlike sleeper trains. Once adjusted to the motion change the bunks were pretty comfortable (if designed for China sizes), although because travelling on roads is never as smooth or predictable as going by rail sleep was difficult. Towards the border we got chatting to the only other westerner on board, an Aussie space cadet called Sarah who was nice, vague, and pretty experienced when it came to backpacking around south-east Asia. Made me feel both organised and lightweight at the same time.
The border was a breeze: nothing was checked at either point, and on the Laos side there wasn't even a customs declaration. Immediately Laos felt much slower and more relaxed than China, and I knew all was going to be good; almost immediately the sun came out to stay for the rest of the day, echoing my mood. We do get dropped at Nateui and the timing is ideal, mid-afternoon. The local tuk-tuk guys try to charge us hugely over the odds to take us to LNT so Ellen adopts the surprising tactic of magicking a bus out of thin air, complete with bewildered locals. The journey was cramped but so enjoyable to see everyone smiling and taking life as it comes, adn a shot hop in a tuk-tuk at the other end brought us safely to our guest house, Boat Landing about 6 kms outside LNT. The place turns out to be paradise and we can't wipe the huge grins from our faces: its an eco-lodge using mostly sustainable materials and renewable energy (including solar water heating), runs one of Laos' top 3 restaurants, and is partnered by Green Discovery who run trekking, kayaking and other adventures along ecotourism principles such as making sure the local indigenous communities benefit, biodiversity is preserved, and the environmental impact of tourism is minimised. Our rooms consists of a traditional wooden bungalow on stilts, teak floors and rattan walls. overlooking the river Namtha. All unbelievably beautiful, serene, and devoid of artificial noises.
Supper is an amazingly fragrant duck stew flavoured with local spices (chilli, lime, ginger, coriander and lemongrass) with sticky rice (ubiquitous here and fortunately delicious) - not dissimilar to Thai food but with less coconuts. We met a German couple who were also looking to trek in the Nam Ha Protected Area (NPA), a conservation zone consisting of 2000 square kilometres of mountainous jungle that you can only enter with a guide and which is home to some of Laos' minority hill tribes, most notable the Akha who are also present in south-west china, northern Thailand and parts of Burma. If we go with them it will be quite a bit cheaper and they seem very nice. We drank the legendary Beer Lao, famed across Asia as the best brew and I have to concur: silky smooth, full bodied yet refreshingly bitter, with a champagne-like head and a need to be taken in quantity (hic).
12th Dec - Not Rushing
I slept the sleep of the dead and awoke very refreshed, actually in time for breakfast - a hearty mix of peppers, onions, eggs and potatoes fried together in a hash and accompanied by toasted fresh baguette with marmalade (you can tell this used to be a French colony), all washed down with coffee Lao which is almost as highly regarded as Beer Lao and which comes with condensed milk on the side, a perk not lost on Ellen. We spent the morning lazily perusing the wide range of adventure options available, almost signing up for the Gibbon Experience, a 3 day trek in a part of the forest where there are incredibly rare Soprano Gibbons, once thought extinct and now subject to much good conservation activity when they deign to put in an appearance. The trip would be spent mostly in tree-tops flying through the jungle on wires, all good fun but its location would have meant too much travelling turning it into a 5 day affair, meraning that we would miss our accommodation booking at Luang Prabang. Instead we opted for a 3 day forest trek through the NPA as it presented a good mix of wildlife based hiking and interacting with various minority hill tribes. Very excited about this as it looks really special: we could not have done it a couple of years ago as there was no such project, and in a couple of years it could be that some of the habitat or communities have not made it through the steadily increasing Chinese-led industrialisation, deforestation and development. But we have seen so many eco-tourism based projects here, all well supported by the very switched-on Laos government, that there is still hope.
We also plotted our time between here and Luang Prabang: after a day's post-trek rest we have chosen to eschew the easy direct bus, and the reasonably popular boat trip along the Mekong, in favour of an arduous 2-bus whole-day bus journey due east to a town called Nong Kiaow, so that we can pick up the river Ou instead. It is supposed to be a stunning journey through huge gores and amazing forest so well worth the diversion. The rest of the day was spent ambling along the river through surrounding villages and local markets, where I bought one of those typically south-east Asian conical hats made of very light bamboo strips to keep the sun off during our trek, much to the amusement of nearly everyone we passed on the way back. Ah well, some things don't change and it was nice to see all the smiles. Rounded the day off nicely with some outstanding pot-roast duck and of course more Beer Lao in the company of Bodo and Anne, the German couple who unfortunately won't be trekking with us due to time constraints.
13th Dec - Trekking
Our trek began at the village of Done Xai, a slightly unusual place as it is home to 2 tribes, the Buddhist Punoi and the nature spirit worshipping Kamu. We are trekking with a Bavarian Daniel and South Aftrican Tracey, both of whome are very relaxed, easy going and much fitter than us (of course), but we have 2 guides, the leader Thone at the front and Mr. Jai at the back so everyone is able to go at their own pace. We walk for the morning through hilly jungle (monsoon forest to be precise), and our first taste is amazing albeit hot. We stop at a stream where our guides lay our lunch on banana leaves (huge). The food is delicious and strangely includes pork scratchings, a local thing. This gives the game away a bit to me and I start to think that Laos is actually made up of the background static from my dreams: a natural, mostly industrial-free paradise of happy laid back people, stunning jungle, perfect weather, some of the best beer and coffee in the world, a cuisine that is wonderful to the taste and real soul food to boot. And now pork scratchings, not to mention the highly improbably but actual existence of a government that is really impressing me the more I hear about them - no mean feat (communist, of course).
The afternoon is spent going mostly up into the higher forest until we reach our base for night 1 - a couple of bamboo huts on stilts. I am starting to see just how versatile bamboo is, as we eat the young shoots, carry water in the bigger pipes, made cooking pots out of them, build huts and even my hat. I think Laos culture is bound up with bamboo in quite a serious way. Cooking on one of these bamboo pots we have a delicious stew of bamboo shoots, banana flowers, wild herbs and rattan along with a dish of unspecified greens, a chilli and tomato paste and somehow some aubergine.. A real feast of the forest as we sit by the fire chatting, star-gazing (the air is so unpolluted here that the night sky really is a sequinned carpet of cosmic beauty) and drinking Lao-Lao, a homespun distilled rice drink that is very more-ish indeed. As I write this by the fire at a bamboo table with our starry ceiling in the middle of a vast protected jungle I can't really believe it is happening. Nor that it is before 9 and I am contemplating turning in already. Damn that Lao-Lao.
Earlier in the evening, just after reaching the huts I walked down towards the stream where the guides has rigged up a bamboo feed-pipe for easy washing. I was alone for the first time in the day and there was still some light left for me to marvel at what a special place this is. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a creamy-coloured animal that looked a bit like a stoat but moved like a cat - I turned my head in time to see it dart away. Ellen reckons it might have been a Linsang but I could not describe it too well; either way I felt really blessed to have that private moment. Later I saw the mesmerising green glow of a firefly and all around us echoed to the sound of calling frogs and birds; I felt extremely connected to the earth in a way that I realise I haven't since Mongolia.
14th Dec - Deep Forest
Absolutely freezing night, but slept OK. Unfortunately the last vestiges of my cold meant that I snored so I probably has the best night - whoops. The others were all very gracious about it and after another feast to begin the day we walked along reasonably flat trails. Thone was constantly pointing out the edible and useful plants, giving us a great education. Yet another feast with loads of sticky rice for lunch and more idyllic walking in the afternoon, through valleys and older parts of the jungle.
We finished up at an Akha village that had been abandoned a year ago as the tribe moved 5 kilometres away at the behest of the government who wanted them to be a little nearer civilisation. An intriguing place as most of the buildings remain in some state of decay as firstly the forest claims back what is hers and then the ex-villagers come to plunder the timbers for constructing their new village. Akha are nature spirit worshippers and we learned a little of their customs, like how new couples must first 'try each other out' in the special but tiny 'love hut', and how every village contains a large swing where the village god lives; he loves to chill out there and in return protects the villagers from injury, especially from machetes. No one is allowed on the swing apart from once a year when the children get to play.
Our guides were very put out to discover that the Akha people who should've come earlier to unlock our hut and prepare our evening meal did not turn up - something had gone wrong with communications somewhere. We didn't really care at all and we elected to stay where we were and forage for supper using our new-found knowledge. We managed a respectable if not sumptuous meal, which actually came as a relief after all the huge meals our guides has been stuffing us with. Luckily some of the huts' gardens has some produce still growing there so aside from our forest goodies we had winter melon, papaya, tomatoes and aubergine.
The guides were pretty low, feeling tired, hungry and let down, after all this was not their fault: we were their charges but they could not fulfil their responsibilities through no fault of their own. Late into the evening however some Akha came with food and unlocked our hut: apparently our guides bumped into a hunter from the village while we were out foraging and asked him to relay instructions back to those who were supposed to be here. There was no real need to panic but nonetheless I await second supper with happy anticipation while writing this. A nice bonus to the story is that because the Akha feel really bad about the mistake we may get to have lunch tomorrow in the chief's lodge when we visit their new village - a great privilege. All in all a really splendid end to a day which was not only immensely pleasurable but which also had some chaos thrown in at the end for good measure. Stars are magnificent again tonight.
15th Dec - Throwing Shapes
A much warmer night, and we awoke early to much mist. It was all quite otherworldly: being in a rapidly disintegrating deserted village in the jungle was rendered even more ghostly as the fog wreathed around its abandoned timbers. One of our new-found Akha guides was a bird-caller so we headed off up the hill behind him to see if we could bring birds in. But none came: apparently hunters had been to the same spot last week, much to the chagrin of the guides, and so quite sensible the birds were staying away. I take this with a little pinch of salt however as the hunters tend to get blamed for all the evils of the world round here: I reckon it was more to do with the fact that we were out so late in the morning because our main guide felt too uncomfortable about letting us go without him at the more appropriate time of 6am (ever since someone decided that the early bird catches the worm its been a nightmare trying to catch one of the buggers having a lie-in). Still it was well worth the climb because the heavy dew and accompanying mist meant that the jungle was dripping from just about every leaf, making suck a vibrant and alive symphony to my ears.
The rest of the trek was on a much easier wide dirt road, the biggest thing we'd seen for days, and took us eventually (via yet another huge feast) to the new Akha village where our trek ended. Our experience of the village was brief and superficial - it felt exploitative and voyeuristic and I learned absolutely nothing meaningful. But the Akha are by nature friendly, easy-going folk and keen purveyors of assorted handicrafts; so it was that we left festooned with all manner of beads and flashes of colour in return for some (very welcome I'm sure) substantial amounts of kip (the ludicrously weak currency in Laos, there being 15000 of them to the pound. Ellen and I changed a ton becoming instant millionaires, but it hasn't really changed us). Ellen's mp3 player was a huge hit with the local children as ever, and she elicited the only genuinely radiant smiles of the afternoon.
On our ride back to town I was able to reflect on a truly wonderful 3 days in, you've guessed it. The Best Place Ever and can only applaud Green Discovery for the sterling job they are doing here on the ecotourism front; there is actually some hope here, and if they were able to modify the trek slightly to encourage a greater interaction between the tourists and tribal people then benefits from cultural exchange could make the whole experience even better.
However great the Laos government's approach seems to be towards protecting the land, communities and culture of this area, and they do seem to be really switched on, this is no time to relax. The Chinese are pushing them to turn an ever-growing porting of former forest over to rubber plantation, and its not too hard to imagine that when a critical mass has been reached the Chinese will be able to hold them to ransom and drive the price right down. At the same time they are doing large-scale funding of road building and development of northern towns such as Boten to turn them into pleasure resorts for Chinese tourists, who will of course spend with Chinese companies. All this adds up to economic annexation of a most unsubtle kind, and I wonder how long the Laos government can hold out. Laos is not a strategically placed country and it has no oil so I can't imagine nations are falling over each other to lend assistance.
Driving into town, the spirit of Beer Lao drew the 4 of us into a bar, where 1 led to 2 led to 3, so when our guide Thone reappeared in early evening and announced he was going to the disco none of us needed much persuading that we should wrap up the trek in style. So in true And and Ellen style, having passed through many of the world's great clubbing hot-spots without so much as a cha-cha-cha, we choose to strut our funky stuff on the dance floors of Luang Nam Tha, party capital of absolutely nowhere. Can't really remember the 6 km journey home but waking in the morning in a soft bed within our own private room was a disorienting if supremely comfortable surprise.